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More than 80 search-and-rescue workers from five agencies covered the mountainside near Denny Creek. Using chain saws, shovels, and their bare hands, they had cleared away tons of ice, but tons more remained. So did unanswered questions: Would the victims have enough air to breathe? Would they drown in the rising waters or give in to hypothermia before rescuers reached them? Was it already too late?
Shoving all that aside, Cushman crawled into the shifting ice and yelled again, "Can anybody hear me?" Then he held his breath, straining to hear something—anything—from the frozen rubble below.
Thursday, August 21, 2008, had begun in a flurry of mismatched hiking boots and lost water bottles in the Corbett family's Seattle home. "It was pretty obvious we hadn't done a lot of this," says Joni Corbett, 45, who, with her neighbor Chrissy Gelmini, 54, had planned to take their two sons, two daughters, and two dogs on a day hike in the nearby mountains.Finally, by early afternoon, the two families were winding their way through the immense spruces and moss-green light of the Denny Creek Trail, 50 miles east of the city. Beside them, the creek chattered with snow melt. The boys, Alec Corbett, 17, and Alessandro (known as Ollie) Gelmini, 14, ran ahead to explore, while the two girls—Marta Gelmini, 10, and Halle Corbett, 7—stayed closer to their mothers, skipping rocks in the water and playing with the dogs. Beside a small waterfall, they ate the lunch they'd carried in their backpacks. "It was so pretty and so close to home," says Gelmini. "I remember thinking, Why don't we do this more often?"
After lunch, they continued hiking, the trail growing steeper and rockier and the air chillier as they climbed. Two miles from the trailhead, they stopped to watch the creek waters cascade in gauzy sheets down the 85-foot Keekwulee Falls. There they noticed the ice field just above the falls. "At first I thought, How cool snow in August," says Corbett. "I assumed it was a patch about as big as a table, but I guess we were seeing it from far off." As they hiked toward it, they realized they'd found more than a simple patch of melting snow.
They'd stumbled upon a yawning, crystalline cave carved and fluted by the waters of Denny Creek, spanning the entire mouth of the 70-foot-wide canyon. Winter storms, blowing in off the Pacific, get snagged on the peaks of the Cascades and drop hundreds of inches of snow in the high country. An exceptionally wet winter had packed the narrow canyon above the falls with drifts. Wind, melting, and its own immense weight then compacted and compressed the snow into a white fang of ice hundreds of feet long and a dozen feet thick even in late August. "It was beautiful," says Corbett—a jewel of winter glistening in the summer sun.
It was also deep, shadowy, cool against the heat of the hike—and enticing. Alec and Ollie posed while Corbett snapped a cell phone photo at the mouth of the cave, then the two boys turned and stepped inside. "It was all echoey in there," Alec recalls. "There was steam rising off the snow, and it was hard to hear over the creek."
Moving deeper into the maze of ice and shadows, they saw a patch of light ahead, another way out. "We had to cross a little channel of the creek," Alec says. "I used a stick to kind of pole-vault across, tossed it back to Ollie, and then turned around." Behind him, Alec heard the crunch of his friend's shoes on the gravel. He saw Cyprus, his beagle, bolt from beneath his feet and scurry out of the cave. Seconds later, he heard a crash:
"It was like snow falling off a roof but louder." Much louder.
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